


Someone Else's Days

by cashewdani



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Angst, Cancer, Character Death, F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-06-13
Updated: 2007-06-13
Packaged: 2018-01-15 02:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1288579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cashewdani/pseuds/cashewdani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There's been too much time to have to think about how he was going to say goodbye to her.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone Else's Days

The nurse disconnects the pulse-ox monitor and then the room is quiet. After all these months, it's quiet. She gives him a sad look, the kind years on the oncology floor have made him accustomed to. “Your wife was a wonderful woman.”

She’s already a was.

He thanks her, because it’s the right thing to do. She turns her back, makes it look like she's doing something with the charts, and maybe she is. He'd prefer to think she's giving him as much privacy as policy allows.

There's been too much time to have to think about how he was going to say goodbye to her. He kisses Pam’s knuckles, her forehead, and finally her mouth. She’s still warm, and for that he’s grateful. It doesn’t really make sense, but he is.

In the hallway their children are waiting. When he sees them, there's nothing to say. He feels himself shaking his head and then Julie’s arms are around him. He cries into her, in a way he swore he would never do, but she holds him tighter. He can hear her, her voice so much more grownup than it should be at 19 saying, “We’re going to be okay Dad. Alright? We’re all going to be okay.” She has her mother’s hair and it makes his chest ache.

He stretches a hand out for Chris who still somehow manages to fit under his shoulder. He can feel the tears through his shirt even though Chris hasn't let anyone see them since this whole thing started. 

They stand there, all touching, in a way he can’t remember them doing for years.

He thinks how this is different than holding them when they were small. When they smelled like _Johnson & Johnson_ and still thought he could protect them and would tell him completely unprompted that he was loved. How in those days, he and Pam would watch them sleep and plan their futures.

And how he was so happy then that he never even thought something like this could happen.

He closes his eyes, and he’s back there. With babies in his arms and Pam on the sofa beside him, stroking his hair. They’re warm on his chest, and her fingers are warm at his temple and in the split second he forgets to remember he gets cold and everything is real.


End file.
